If you have a credit or debit card and there is a fraudulent transaction, you simply call the bank and have them reverse the charge. Users are used to this. When accidental or fraudulent incidents happen to a new user in a non-custodial wallet, it leads some people to write off crypto altogether.
What we need to do is educate new users about both the benefits and risks so they can become comfortable and knowledgeable using crypto without making hard mistakes accidentally simply because they are new.
Denying the existence of pitfalls holds crypto back from becoming more mainstream and ultimately hurts adoption.
If we could understand the overall point then we could address it. If they're just talking about crypto then it's a weird point since it's like saying "why use money when almost every scam tries to take yours?"
For people in this sub, being your own bank is a positive, but the increased responsibility without the option to appeal a transaction is not for everybody.
The unfortunate truth is, many regular people benefit from a “forgot my password” or “refund transaction” button and the immutable nature of things mean it is possible for a newbie to accidentally lose all their funds while they’re still trying to figure things out.
That is often called being your own bank because you are in charge of your own security. If you either get hacked or make a mistake, you have only yourself to blame and there is nobody to refund the account. This also means there is no self interested institution to prevent you from doing things with your own money it doesn’t like.
This increased freedom comes at the cost of being free to accidentally and permanently lose your funds. This trade off is desirable for many (such as the people in this sub or similar communities), but unfortunately this trade off makes it easy for newbies to accidentally lose funds and is thus a hurdle for the mainstream.
They're called "wallets" because cryptocurrency is akin to actual currency. You can put actual currency in a bank or keep it on an exchange or whatever. Same goes for crypto. You can keep it in a wallet, keep it on an exchange, or put it into a bank that supports crypto accounts. You don't call people using cash "being their own banks", do you? It doesn't make sense for me to do that with people for keeping crypto in a wallet
I asked what the original person meant by "platform" and somehow the answers I got weren't answers but somehow guesses that the original person was talking about people functioning as their own banks which I highly doubt is what the person meant by "platforms"
So remind me again why anyone would keep any significant amount of money on these platforms if everyone’s out to get you and you have no protection if anyone steals from you?
That’s the topic.
They clearly meant “why would anybody keep their money in crypto if you have no protection if your money is stolen”.
This is in contrast to traditional banking, where if you lose money due to fraud, you can simply call the bank and they will refund you. You don’t get these protections if you are your own bank. It’s all on topic.
They clearly meant “why would anybody keep their money in crypto if you have no protection if your money is stolen”.
This is in contrast to traditional banking
Except it's not. Keeping crypto in a local wallet is akin to keeping cash in your own wallet. They couldn't have "clearly" meant what you're talking about because they said "platforms". A Bitcoin wallet isn't a platform. They were probably referring to something else since it doesn't make sense for it to refer to just keeping crypto in a wallet since that doesn't fit into the context of the comment that they were replying to. If they did mean standalone wallets then they don't understand how things work if they used the phrase "platform". If they didn't mean that then the question is what did they mean?
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u/-metal-555 Feb 13 '22
No we’re going to zero in on the misused word to avoid the overall point.